Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

Counterfeit Monkey

About the Story

Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

News

Release 5 is now available from emshort.com, and will be working through to a place in the IF Archive soon as well. Change log details can be found at http://emshort.com/counterfeit_monkey/source.html .

I have not been uploading each release to the archive in order to avoid overloading the maintainers, but new releases are posted to the game's website. Bugs squashed since the first release include several that made it difficult to use the game's built-in highlighting help; several that made hard mode less enjoyable than intended; and a bug affecting one end-game path. A number of minor typos and trivial defects have also been repaired. There are still a number of issues outstanding, so I expect there will be further releases to come.

ScatmaniaWhat’s most-special about this remarkable game is the primary puzzle mechanic, and how expertly (not to mention seamlessly and completely) it’s been incorporated into the play experience. Over the course of the game, you’ll find yourself equipped with a number of remarkable tools that change the nature of game objects by adding, removing, changing, re-arranging or restoring their letters, or combining their names with the names of other objects: sort of a “Scrabble® set for real life”... I can’t say too much more without spoiling one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever played.See the full review

Neogaf forum threadAdventure games were always filled with great little moments off the beaten track that would reward you with their content. Achievements may be dumb, but the acknowledgment works with the faint metroid feel I get from the abilities and areas I uncover.

Ok, that's enough, but the plot is also fun and highly allegoric (I love that stuff) there's only a few real speedbumps, and with the nouns being the thing, the guess the verb stigma of interactive fiction is slight.

Totally DublinThe pen may be mightier than the sword, but mightier still, according to Counterfeit Monkey, is the Tipp-Ex brush. This is a text adventure that exploits the medium to a degree rarely seen.See the full review

Platform NationJP LeBreton of Double Fine described it quite astutely as “Portal for English” and he’s right; it feels almost exactly like that. Obviously, you aren’t crafting literal portals, but the changes you can actuate and the rate and capacity for which you do it definitely feels like you are zipping around the world through portals.See the full review

Dork NightThe gameplay is fun. There are multiple solutions to nearly all of the puzzles, and I found myself looking for all of the different words I could make with the tools available to me, even when I already knew what to do. The actual puzzles were occasionally cloudy, but on the whole, they made sense in the universe that the game had constructed. Moreover, it's immersive. At one point, you sidle up to the bar and order a strong drink, and I couldn't help but feel like it was the most appropriate spy moment I've ever experienced in a game, and even that was influenced by the linguistic overtones of the game.See the full review

GameTrailers.comCounterfeit Monkey is consistently surprising and adroit, engaged with its own core without drowning in witty self-referential winks; putting the basis of language at the forefront, the verb and the noun, without piling on verbose diatribes of exposition. Successful, smart, and fun, its puzzles and pace bridge the gap between curling up with a good book and letting you save the world. Or at least your own skin.See the full review

mathNEWSMultiple solutions almost always exist, so it’s possible to get creative if you’re stuck, and in fact I ended up developing an intuition for solving the puzzles (none of that “rope + banana = fishing rod” nonsense, thank you).See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Puzzles NomineesI’m here to discuss the puzzles, not the story. The puzzles, though, are those of a storyteller. Just as there’s an arc to the plot, there’s a discernable arc to the puzzle content... Now, the whole progression here is one of increasing power, but this doesn’t make things easier. On the contrary: pretty much everything you’re able to make in the intro area is useful, but the set of things you can make grows far faster than the set of things you can solve puzzles with, drowning intent in possibility.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Use of Innovation NomineesAt the highest level, convenience features abound, including a GO TO command, tutorial mode, and a way to track active goals. But on a deeper level, the world of Anglophone Atlantis and the structural conceits of the game are tailor-made to showcase the joys of text and elide its limitations... At its core, Monkey structurally zeroes in on the strong point of parser-based fiction (making you feel clever) while minimizing the frustrations (making you feel stupid).See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Implementation Nominees (Sean M. Shore)Assessing Counterfeit Monkey‘s implementation is a bit like being a judge in Olympic ice skating: you really have to factor in degree of difficulty. It’s one thing if the skater performs a safe routine that dutifully checks off all the compulsory elements. It’s another if he or she almost flawlessly executes a quadruple lutz and triple toe loop.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Implementation Nominees (Jason McIntosh)I predict a long life for Counterfeit Monkey, especially if the author returns to address some of these snags for the sake of increased accessibility. The game is destined to sit beside Anchorhead on most any parser-IF aficionado’s shortlist of canonical long-form works. Just as Gentry’s game epitomized adventure game themes and techniques up through the latter 1990s, Monkey succeeds in synthesizing adventure-game developments from diverse sources with the unique powers of text into an ever-surprising and truly unforgettable work.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Setting Nominees (Jacqueline A. Lott)It seems obvious, that in a world where you can add or remove letters from the names of objects, smack them with a homonym paddle, or zap a phrase into an anagram of itself, that there’d be substantial consequences: it would deeply affect people’s lives, the economy, politics, everyone’s world view… all manner of things. But the reality is that most games (heck, even many static fictions) that are fortunate enough to latch onto something truly original are so excited to share the novelty with you that they fall short or completely fail to round out the rest of the world. Not only does Counterfeit Monkey fail to fall into this trap, it avoids it so adeptly that you may not even notice.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best Setting Nominees (Duncan Bowsman)The creation and formation of language is not only political in Anglophone Atlantis, but paramount. It forms the topography of a cityscape, such that Anglophone and Francophone worlds are full of different possibilities. Depluralizing cannons make fast work of enemy ships in an invasion. Wordplay is resistance.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best PC Nominees (Stephen Granade)All of that makes Alexandra, the player character of Counterfeit Monkey, one of the best PCs I’ve seen in years. Alexandra combines the technical fireworks of a subverted protagonist/narrator dichotomy with two exquisitely-developed characters whose emotional arc drives the story.See the full review

XYZZY Awards blogReviews of Best PC Nominees (Jenni Polodna)I’d like to imagine some kind of not terrible future for Alexandra, one where she doesn’t descend into gibbering Lovecraftian madness, but it’s so hard to even wrap my head around who Alexandra is, what a cohesive blend of these two people would even be like, that I suspect she is maybe just hosed. Sorry, Alexandra. Good luck, though! You never know! Have fun doing crimes and stuff!See the full review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey is a large and ambitious contribution to several IF genres, but I think the description that best indicates the gameplay experience is "wordplay puzzle game". Short imagines a world in which names are more fundamental than physical properties, and to rename an individual object (subject to given rules) is to transform it to something else. The game's island setting of Anglophone Atlantis is a centre for development of word-altering technology, and the protagonist must make use of this technology in order to smuggle plans for a new device out from under the noses of the island's oppressive government. A tool available from the start of the game can remove any letter of the alphabet from an object's name; to give an example not from the game, a BEARD could become a BEAR and then an EAR. The game allows any appropriately-named object to be modified, often in more complicated ways than this example suggests. The range of options seemed daunting at first, but I found that puzzles were arranged to ensure that new abilities and locations become available only once I had demonstrated proficiency with the resources already available.

A puzzle game founded on such depth of simulation would be noteworthy in itself, but Short combines it with a setting and plot that are engaging in their own right and make the fantastical premise seem almost credible. Over the the course of the game, the player learns about the history of word-altering technology and its likely future development, not to mention its competing uses by criminals and the authorities. By making clear the legal and technological constraints on the transformations, Counterfeit Monkey not only explains how a world in which "animal" and "mineral" are mutable categories escapes incomprehensible chaos, but provides a natural basis for the police-state setting and industrial espionage plot.

Although this review has referred to a "protagonist", the player character Alexandra is actually a verbal and physical "synthesis" of two people, linguist Alex and spy Andra, who have decided that sharing a merged body temporarily will give them the opportunity to leave Anglophone Atlantis unrecognized. The player's input is interpreted as attempts at action from Andra, while Alex takes on the role of the narrator and parser. The contrast between the dominating, problem-focused Andra and the more cautious, locally-knowledgeable Alex provides a perfect fit for the player-parser relationship.

The game's tone is also something of a synthesis. Some excellent humour arises from the bizarre objects the player can create, while the dystopian background is treated quite seriously. The ethical implications of Alexandra's actions receive due attention, but I felt that it was here that the only perceptible tension arose between the plot and puzzles. ((Spoiler - click to show)Concerns are raised in the game about the power of word-manipulation to bring people or animals into existence, and Alexandra's equipment is initally configured to prevent this. However, the puzzles assume that the player will be happy to create "animates" routinely once this ability is acquired.) This criticism is trivial in light of the remarkable achievement that Counterfeit Monkey represents as an adventure game, a simulation, a narrative and an experiment in IF player-parser relations. I hope that any player not allergic to wordplay will download it and enjoy it as much as I did.

Excellent technical accomplishment and a great sense of fun, June 6, 2013

by Jim Kaplan (Jim Kaplan has a room called the location. The location of Jim Kaplan is variable.)Related reviews: emily short, humor

Play it if: you want a lengthy and engrossing puzzle-solving experience and a healthy dollop of satirical humor to occupy you for a day or two.

Don't play it if: you're in the mood for something that more heavily emphasizes atmosphere or depth of characterization.

Boy, did I like Counterfeit Monkey. It had me grinning like a maniac within five minutes of starting, and that grin never let up. Even when my face got sore after the first few hours.

The most consistent tonal impression I got from Counterfeit Monkey was that of a high-quality Monkey Island game. Surreal plot devices, anachronistic histories, a coastal setting, a light-hearted story with streaks of darkness...it's all there. Oddly enough it also reminds me of The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game in its tone and charm, though I prefer Monkey for its outstanding gameplay and depth of setting. There's even a hint of Planescape: Torment lurking in there somewhere (a detailed setting where belief and opinion have physical power).

In gameplay terms, Monkey combines a feeling of casual puzzle-solving fun with a profound degree of technical effort. In that respect it feels like a sort of leveled-up crossword, which is appropriate because almost all of the puzzles here are navigated through some form of wordplay. I spent a chunk of the first half of the game a little concerned that the gameplay wouldn't significantly change. The letter-removals were great, but they also felt fairly straightforward, more so than what I think I'm used to in the early stages of a longer Emily Short game. But then the story starts to throw in some fun alternative powers, and remains fairly dynamic from there. Mixing it up with some memory exploration and the ongoing plotline, and you have a story which is fairly excellently paced.

It's difficult to overstate how much effort it must have taken (at least form the perspective of a novice like me) to have implemented the wordplay. A lot of my enjoyment came out of trying some more obscure ideas and realizing just how thorough the research was - how delighted I was to find that the author had taken the time to implement a cad, complete with "smouldering gaze"!

The novelty of the word manipulation tools would have made this game worth a spin regardless, but Emily Short (with a nod to Steve Meretzky) elevates what could have been a gimmick into not only a variety of satisfying puzzles but a well-realized world in which to integrate them. The theming here is some of the strongest I've seen. The map, the culture, the events and obstacles that drive the plot--everything ties into the central conceit of linguistic manipulation. Short wisely touches on various aspects of the lore without attempting to exhaustively explain anything, providing just enough acknowledgment of the issues that would surely arise in this world without making you stop and question whether any of this really makes sense. The overall style is one of parsimony and understatement. Some of that is probably to cut down on extraneous nouns, but it keeps the game focused. No LOOK UNDER puzzles here.

There's a lot of heady game design stuff going on in general. You can tell a lot of thought was put into the thematic clues, ways to encourage experimentation, and how to remind the player of important elements. The pacing and tiered nature of the obstacles is excellent. There is one challenge I felt was too much of an outlier in terms of difficulty, but given the vocabulary-driven nature of the puzzles, maybe that just means I need to play more Scrabble. Still, the game never quite shakes the feeling of being a vocabulary test at its core, even at its best moments when requiring you to think categorically towards a particular end. Judged solely as a puzzle knot, Short's earlier work Savoir-Faire is the better game, with more clever ideas concerning the properties of objects. Which is not to say that Counterfeit Monkey does not have its share of clever ideas, but Monkey's greater strengths are in the breadth of its implementation, the novelty of the premise, and the creativity and playfulness that arise from seeing just how many things you can make. The range of possibilities means that several puzzles have multiple solutions, and you will probably learn some words you didn't know existed as you experiment with intermediate steps (I was not above using an online word generator to help with one of the harder puzzles).

A final comment about characterization: it's well-written and believable, but I wasn't invested. Especially not in the ending. Some of that is due to me approaching these games primarily as puzzlefests, but it's not like I wasn't interested in the world and the plot. I think the problem is that (Spoiler - click to show)Andra's voice is too intermittent. When a play session is mostly input/output in typical IF fashion, I'm not sure there is room for another strong voice apart from the narrator. I, the player, am ultimately neither Alex nor Andra, and although their issues tie into the plot, by the end I still felt like I was watching two people fuss at each other and occasionally tell me stories about how interesting their friends are, or about drama in their lives. Maybe that's an intentional point about how it would feel to be in their particular situation.

If you enjoyed Counterfeit Monkey...

Related Games

Other members recommend these games for people who like Counterfeit Monkey, or gave both high ratings:

Shuffling Around, by Andrew Schultz (as Ned Yompus)A weird power to save a weird world. So you just got fired from the best company ever, and it's the best day of your life. New opportunities! New horizons! New ways to look at things! Like calling this stupid kiss-off job fair a...

Andromeda Dreaming, by Joey JonesAliss can control her dreams, but will this help her when she's stuck in a galaxy on the brink of destruction? Winner of the Andromeda Legacy competition 2012, Andromeda Dreaming is in the same setting as Andromeda Awakening.

Literary IF by streeverGames that have literary merit make this list. To be accepted, a game should: 1. Evoke deeper themes and meaning, without being blunt. 2. Consistently employ good writing, both in dialogue and descriptions. 3. Tell a rich story from...

Vast but not Cruel by Floating InfoI'd like to see games that are long and spacious, yet aren't Cruel (or very Nasty) on the Zarfian scale. Essentially, games that the main reason for saving is for time or the occasional timed part.

Games with a city setting by JonathanCRI'm interested in games that are set in cities - historical, modern, fantasy, or science-fiction. In particular, games that make you feel that you are in a real, functioning, busy city where life is being lived all around you. Which...